It is 4.40 am. I am hearing an increasingly impatient and loud moaning from the staircase which is a sign for me to get out of bed. I stumble down the stairs in the darkness and open the front door to our cat, Gata, who starts her usual morning hunting routine. I take a deep…
‘You should start writing’, says Áron not for the first time this month, without giving me the sense of pressure, but with his typical, meaningful look. ‘But what should I write about in this current situation?’, I ask in despair, ‘everything would sound so unnatural and insincere…. ‘Write from your heart honey’, he answers and…
This story has been waiting for me to tell you since last year. The scene of this story is a small village in northwestern Hungary, in the Bakony mountains, however it could be any village where those kind of people live for whom keeping traditions, and preserving values for the next generation is a vital…
I am standing in the kitchen pantry room, in front of the crates that are full of apples of this autumn and an old story pops into my mind that my mother used to tell us. It is a story that my mother used in order to demonstrate what the difference is between an optimistic…
It is a story about a ‘not ordinary’ hammer. Its handle is made from wood, carefully polished and lacquered, fits comfortably to my palm, and it is getting thinner direction to the head. The wood itself is dark, full of spots and scratches, it could definitely tell many stories if it could speak. At the…
My grandma has turned 88. Normally, she doesn’t like her birthdays, but we always insisted to celebrate them. It was hard for her to accept that she can’t get prepared and welcome us the way she always used to. With pain in her fingers it is getting difficult to bake and after sitting her legs…
A year after we moved back to our newly renovated, almost 100 year-old house, slowly everything is finding its place. Homemaking is not a fast process. In the pantry room the shelves are packed with jams and compotes, soon we will need to build new shelves because we are running out of space. I collected…
I am standing in our pantry room, over a kilogram of old, sad potatoes from last year in a wicker basket. They are ugly, wrinkled like a rhino’s skin, and already a little bit soft, but beside of that they are OK. What shall I make with them? I could experiment once again with a…
After living in big cities for 15 years, I still cannot get used to the extraordinary human way of life in our village in Northwestern Hungary, even though it has been already 4 years since we moved in and I cannot be enough grateful for the kindness that we are experiencing every day. One day,…
When I was a child, we lived with my grandmother on my father’s side in the same house for 14 years: she lived downstairs, and we lived in the attic so I would spend a lot of time with her, when I wouldn’t feed animals with our neighbour, Aunt Maca. We would play Hungarian cards…
